NVIDIA might be working on G-SYNC Linux support

Recently NVidia launched their latest Beta driver, NVidia 337.12 beta drivers, which brought back the capability of both overclocking and under clocking the GPU on Linux machines. And now, according to an analysis by a Phoronix reader of the open source drivers NVidia is apparently going to bring GSync to Linux machines pretty soon.

NVidia GSync is proprietary technology found on supported NVidia cards that reduces tearing, stuttering, input lag, and other similar gaming problems by not having the monitor’s refresh rate be fixed but rather it’s a dynamic refresh rate that will scan out whenever the GPU is finished rendering. Till now, this feature was only limited to Windows 7, 8 & 8.1. But maybe due to the flurry by the developers to bring games to Linux and game engines being released on Linux, it could be anyone’s guess that NVidia thought it to be a good time to give Linux users the full feature package too. Add to that Valve pushing Steam machines and Steam OS and NVidia has all the more reason to give their much needed attention in bringing more features to Linux.

According to the findings by the user in NVidia settings that are open sourced, there are references to GSync. In particular, some defines right now related to G-SYNC handling by this Linux GUI utility for managing the NVIDIA binary driver. There’s a NV_CTRL_GSYNC_ALLOWED define and the code comment says, “NV_CTRL_GSYNC_ALLOWED – when TRUE, OpenGL will enable G-SYNC when possible; when FALSE, OpenGL will always use a fixed monitor refresh rate.” This isn’t a shared header file with the NVIDIA Windows driver.

This does show that people over at NVidia are already working on bringing this feature to Linux, so we could expect it to hit Linux platform with their next major driver release. Stay tuned for more news as they become available.

About Partha Das

Lover of food, books, anime, movies, music, tech, games and sleep. Hobbies include cooking, drawing, tinkering, coding, electronics/robotics and general mad-scientist stuff. Love to learn different languages and about different cultures and trying out new things. Currently learning Japanese and Korean too!
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